Searcher

by T J Alexander

  ‘Do you remember exactly when all this happened?’ asks Adah.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t tell you the day or the month. Autumn it was, seven or more years ago. But I’ll tell you what I do remember. It was just around the time they had that great beer flood. You’ll remember that, surely? When that great barrel of beer burst open down Tottenham Court way, and all them people was out in the streets scooping up the beer in their pails and buckets. Just before that beer flood, it was. Well, I saw Catherine go out with the children, and later that day – I remember it was getting dark – I said to my Tom, “That’s funny,” I said, “I ain’t seen Catherine come home yet. Wonder why she’s so late.” Well, not long after that she comes home in a terrible state. Crying and shaking, and little Susannah crying too, and the one baby in her arms, little Rosie, bawling fit to wake the dead, but little Molly nowhere to be seen. “She’s stolen my Molly! She’s stolen my Molly!” says Catherine. “Who’s stolen Molly?” I asks, and she tells me the story. Dreadful, it was. You wouldn’t believe such things could happen in broad daylight—’

  Lizzie Murray suddenly breaks off, as a thought strikes her.

  ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘I’ve got something to show you. The magistrate gave them to Catherine, after the trial was over, and Catherine gave one to me. I’ve got it somewhere here, I’m sure, if I can lay my hands on it.’

  She disappears into a corner of the room and rummages about in one of the piles of belongings. Adah hears the clatter of falling saucepans and muffled curses, and then Lizzie Murray appears again, proudly bearing a tattered scroll of paper.

  ‘I can’t read them long words too well myself, but this’ll tell you all about it,’ she says.

  The corners of the hand bill are dog-eared, and a large stain of uncertain origin covers a section of the print, but the words are still clearly visible in the flicking firelight that fills the room.

  Adah holds the paper to the light and reads:

  20 POUNDS REWARD

  WHEREAS ABOUT 3 O’CLOCK ON THE AFTERNOON OF FRIDAY LAST, THE HEINOUS CRIME OF CHILD-STEALING WAS PERPETRATED BY A FEMALE IN THE COMMERCIAL ROAD, WHO FELONIOUSLY KIDNAPPED AND STOLE AWAY THE INFANT DAUGHTER OF ONE CATHERINE CREAMER, WIFE OF MATTHEW CREAMER, LABOURER – WHOEVER MAY GIVE SUCH INFORMATION AS MAY LEAD TO THE APPREHENSION AND CONVICTION OF THE SAID FELON SHALL RECEIVE A REWARD OF TWENTY POUNDS FROM THE LAMBETH-STREET MAGISTRATES OFFICE.

  NB – THE FEMALE IN QUESTION, WHO FIRST ACCOSTED THE VICTIM IN ST. PAUL’S CHURCHYARD AND LURED HER TO THE COMMERCIAL ROAD ON FALSE PRETENCES, WAS ABOUT FORTY YEARS OF AGE, DARK, WITH A POCKMARKED VISAGE, AND HAD ON A RED SPOTTED GOWN, A WHITE SHAWL AND A BLACK BONNET.

  17 OCTOBER 1814

  * * * * *

  JOHN W. NELSON, PRINTER, WHITECHAPEL

  Catherine Creamer’s Story

  ‘It was the rummest tale you’ll ever hear,’ says Lizzie Murray, as Adah peruses the hand bill, ‘and I was there when Catherine told it to her Matthew. We was the first to hear it, except for the magistrates. She’d been sitting in front of St. Paul’s, she said, and it was a gloomy, windy day, not many people about, so her begging bowl was empty. Then along comes this woman and drops a shining new penny into the bowl. Well, Catherine was so surprised, because this weren’t no grand lady, she said, just a commonish looking woman. Then this woman starts speaking to Catherine, all sweet and friendly like. “Such a cold day to be sitting in the street begging. How are you going to feed your bonny babies with hardly a penny in your bowl?” Sweet words like that. Then this strange woman starts to spin a yarn about how she knows a fine lady who lives in a big house with a garden and just loves little children, and if this fine lady could see Catherine and her bonny babies, she’d be sure to give them money enough to buy strawberries and cream for a year. “No point sitting here in the cold,” she says to Catherine, “why don’t I take you to meet this kind lady in her fine house?” Well, Catherine’d never heard such a story before, but she thinks, it can’t do no harm. So off she goes with the stranger, carrying both the twins in her arms, with little Susannah running along behind, and they walk and walk, right through Leadenhall Market and down towards Whitechapel way—’

  ‘Didn’t Catherine ask the woman her name?’ interjects Adah.

  ‘She did, she did, and the woman gave her some name or other, but then what with all the confusion that happened after, she’d forgotten it. And anyway, everything that child-stealer said was just a pack of lies. Then, when they got to somewhere around the start of the Commercial Road, says Catherine, her arms was aching from carrying the twins and the wind was blowing her cloak off, so this stranger offered to carry little Molly for her. By then the older child Susannah was getting tired and starting to whine, so the woman says to Catherine, “Look, here’s an inn. Why don’t we sit a while and have something to drink? Don’t you worry, I have the money to pay for it.” Well, Catherine didn’t want no drink. She wanted to meet this fine lady and show her the twins and find out how much money the lady would give her. And now she’s starting to feel there’s something odd about this woman and her fancy yarns. Then they walk on a little further, and the woman says, “Wait here a moment. I’ll be back in no time,” and she turns down one of them lanes behind the Commercial Road. Well, Catherine had her suspicions by then, and she weren’t about to let this woman out of her sight, so she starts to follow her down the alleyway. They was building all new houses along that road back then, and there was bricks and wood and piles of dirt everywhere, and they hadn’t gone far down the lane when little Susannah trips over a pile of bricks and grazes her knee and starts howling. So of course Catherine turns round to comfort her, and when she looks up, that evil woman has gone! Run off with baby Molly, she has, just like that! Of course, Catherine sets up a hue and cry and goes running after her, but the woman’s nowhere to be seen. So poor Catherine, she’s screaming and crying and yelling, and she goes running back to the inn on the main road and calls out for the men in there to come and help her search for her baby. But by then it was too late. That child snatcher’s run off with the baby and vanished into thin air. So in the end, one of them men took poor Catherine and the two little ones to the Lambeth Street Magistrates Office. The magistrates were proper gentlemen, Catherine said. Gave her and Susannah milk to drink, and sent out the officers to hunt for little Molly. But of course they couldn’t find her—’

  ‘Mrs Murray,’ interjects Adah, ‘would you let me borrow a copy of this hand bill, just for a week or two? I can promise to return it to you. By the by,’ she adds, ‘who had the hand bills made up? It must have cost a pretty penny to have them printed.’

  ‘Lord, yes,’ replies Lizzie, ‘you can keep that for good. What use would I have for it now they’re all gone? It was the magistrates what had them hand bills made. She was taken to see the chief magistrate himself. Sir Daniel, he was called, so Catherine said. He told her how there’d been this other child stolen away to Gosport by that wicked woman Harriet Magnis, and how the magistrates had printed hand bills, and brought that little boy back. “It’s a piece of luck for you that they’ve made a crime of child stealing now,” he said to Catherine. “No-one’s going to get away with that crime again, like Harriet Magnis did. We’ll find your Molly, even if we have to hunt the length and breadth of England for her.”’

  Sir Daniel, notes Adah. This woman may be strange and garrulous, but she seems to know her story well; for the chief magistrate at Lambeth-Street is indeed a Sir Daniel. She remembers William speaking of him rather sourly, and also (unusually for William) with a faint note of fear.

  ‘But it was a whole six weeks before they found little Molly,’ Lizzie Murray continues. ‘It seemed like everyone in London was talking about the crime. We had all sorts wandering into the yard and asking questions. Somehow they’d found out Catherine’s address, and they all wanted to come and see the poor woman whose child had been stolen away, just like that little boy what Harriet Magnis stole. And all that while Catherine was in despair, crying e
very day, and not sleeping at night, thinking she’d never see her baby again. In the end, when they found her, that poor little babe was on a ship in the Thames where she’d been taken by this wicked sailor’s whore. They took Catherine out to the ship, and of course, the moment she saw little Molly, she knew her, and knew the woman who’d stolen her too. But by that time – six weeks to the day after Molly was stolen, it was – well, by then the poor baby was no more than skin and bones.’

  ‘But they brought her home safe and arrested her kidnapper, did they not?’ says Adah. ‘So where is little Molly now?’

  Elizabeth Murray is frozen into sudden silence. She stares at Adah, her mouth half open, as though she suspects the Searcher of having taken leave of her senses.

  ‘Good Lord! What a question!’ she says at last. ‘Little Molly’s dead, of course.’

  ‘Dead?’ says Adah. ‘But, when did she die?’

  ‘I thought you knew,’ says Lizzie Murray. ‘She died back then. A couple of months after she was stolen.’

  Now it is Adah’s turn to be dumbstruck.

  ‘I … I don’t understand,’ she stammers.

  ‘They brought her home,’ says Lizzie, ‘but not safe and sound. Like I said, she weren’t nothing but skin and bones when they found her. That whore Sarah Stone pretended it was her baby. Trying to cheat her stupid sailor husband, just like Harriet Magnis did. Except that Sarah Stone and her sailor weren’t even married. It all came out at the trial. They were living like man and wife but they were living in sin. She told all her family she was having a baby, but she was lying, of course. So she didn’t have no milk, did she? Hadn’t fed that poor baby proper. That Molly, she was such a bonny little thing when she was stolen, but when Catherine got her back, she was already half wasted away, and her lovely hair all thin and patchy. We tried everything to bring her health back, Catherine and me. Got her cow’s milk from the dairy, and made her pap. And of course Catherine still had her milk. Her twins was only two months old. But poor little Molly wouldn’t take the breast no more. She just faded away. She was dead already before that Sarah Stone was sent for trial. I was there in the room when that poor baby died in her mother’s arms. They buried her right here in the Golden Lane burial ground, but you won’t find the grave now. It’s all overgrown. Them Creamers never could afford no headstone. That’s why I say they should have hanged that Sarah Stone. She weren’t no better than a murderess. Caused little Molly’s death as surely as if she’d killed that poor baby with her own hands. And now her poor twin dead too …’

  The tears well up in Lizzie’s eyes again, and she wipes them away with the back of one big hand.

  ‘But what am I thinking of,’ she continues, gulping back the tears, ‘not offering you a morsel to eat or drink, when you’ve come all this way from Norton Folgate. There’s not much food in the house, but I think I’ve got a twist of tea somewhere, and the kettle’s boiling. Would you take a cup of tea?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ replies Adah. ‘I must be getting home. If any of the Creamers come back, you can contact me through the Norton Folgate courthouse. The officers there know where to find me.’

  She rises from her uncomfortable seat on the stool and is about to say her farewells when a thought strikes her, and she opens her bag again, and brings out the little jade button, with its curling outline of a dragon, and holds it out on her hand for Lizzie Murray to look at.

  ‘Have you, by chance, ever seen this before?’

  But the other woman only shakes her head. ‘Never seen anything like it in all me born days,’ she says.

  Adah has hardly ever travelled in a Hackney carriage before, and can barely afford to hail one this evening. But as she leaves Golden Lane market, the church bells are tolling seven, and she thinks of Sally lying sick and fretful in bed, and of her other children waiting hungrily for their supper.

  Besides, she has suddenly been overcome by a strange dizziness. She hails a passing cab and sinks gratefully into its seat.

  The lamps are flaring brightly outside the gates of the debtor’s prison as they clatter past. With the coming of darkness, the air has suddenly grown very cold.

  I should be relieved, thinks Adah. I have found the answer to my search. I know the dead child’s name: Rosie Creamer. It’s a sad and strange story, but my part in it is complete. A story of family tragedies: first the baby Molly stolen, and returned half-starved a month later, only to die in her mother’s arms. Then the surviving twin Rosie, barely seven years old, goes missing. Then Catherine herself dies in the frenzied search for her daughter. At least Catherine’s death has saved me the terrible task of having to tell her of her daughter’s death. As soon as the thought enters her head, Adah chides herself for her selfishness.

  As the carriage jolts through the dark streets, she remembers the words of the Rabbi Meldola: ‘Our mortal minds may play tricks on us, but tricks have their own meaning. It is for us to discover that meaning.’ Rosie’s twin Molly is long dead. The scratching Adah had heard at the door of the courthouse was probably just a cat. The dark shadow she glimpsed in the street was surely just a shadow. The ghost that Jonah Hall saw was doubtless only a vision created by his drunken brain. The little girl who stole the poor man’s apples must simply have been an urchin whose face happened to look a little like Rosie Creamer’s.

  But however hard she tries to suppress them, Adah Flint cannot banish those other words of the Rabbi’s. What were they? ‘We do indeed believe that troubled spirits walk at dead of night, and that we would be wise to be aware of them, and guard against their influence.’ There is a chilling vision that arises unbidden from somewhere deep in her mind, and closes like a hand around her heart: a vision of the ghost of the dead baby Molly Creamer, growing silently and invisibly alongside the living child Rosie, watching over her sister like a small guardian spirit, following her invisibly as she wandered lost through the streets of the city, and, in the end, stepping out like a shadow from the darkness of the ruined stable, to cover the body of her twin with a small black cloak.

  PART TWO

  Sarah Stone

  January 1815

  The Verdict

  ON 11 JANUARY 1815, the day of her trial, Sarah Stone stands in the dock of the Old Bailey, looking down at her hands, which clutch the polished wooden rail in front of her for support. In the weeks that she has been in Newgate Prison, her hands have changed. Her nails have grown long, and then been roughly hacked back with a knife by the fat, lardy wards-woman whom everyone calls ‘Queen Charlotte.’ Her fingers have turned purplish and blotchy. A patch of white skin is peeling from one knuckle of her right hand. Her hands no longer belong to her. Her limbs seem to be floating away from the rest of her body. As she listens to one witness after another talking about her to the judge, never turning their faces in her direction, she gazes at her own life from the outside. She has become a stranger to herself, a woman in someone else’s story: I am no longer ‘I’, ‘myself’. I am ‘that woman, Sarah Stone.’

  The men in the front row of the jury benches have twisted their torsos around to engage in heated debate with their fellow jurors in the back row. Sarah watches them intently but dispassionately. One thin, balding man in the back row bends forward repeatedly to argue with the jury foreman, from time to time vigorously shaking his head. The juror at the far end of the bench, meanwhile – a ginger-haired fellow in an ill-fitting brown jacket – seems to take no part in the discussions at all. Instead, he nervously jiggles his feet and glances repeatedly over his shoulder, as though searching for a familiar face in the crowd.

  When she lifts her head and looks straight in front of her, Sarah finds herself gazing into a long mirror on the opposite side of the courtroom, which reflects the glaring white wintery light that shines through the big windows on every side. In the middle of the mirror stands a woman with dark hair and a greyish pock marked face, dressed in a grey prison gown, staring back at her: that woman, Sarah Stone.

  At length the argumentative juror
falls silent, and slumps back into his seat. The clamour of voices from the crowded courtroom gradually subsides into a silence full of anticipation. The jury foreman rises to his feet. He is a solidly built man with a soft, sagging face and a head of silver hair which shines as though it has been oiled and polished. A draper, perhaps, or a wine merchant.

  ‘Have you agreed upon your verdict?’ barks the judge. He seems incensed that it has taken the jury a full twenty minutes to make up their minds.

  ‘We have, your Honour.’

  ‘Do you find the accused, Sarah Stone, guilty or not guilty of the crime of child-stealing?’

  The foreman opens his mouth to speak, but as he does so, a large black fly lands on his forehead, and he pulls out a handkerchief to brush it away. Watching the plump, be-ringed hand that clutches the handkerchief, Sarah knows with perfect certainty what he is going to say.

  ‘Guilty, your Honour.’

  The court erupts into a roar of applause, and the foreman sits down abruptly and sneezes into the handkerchief. Amid the gleeful, grinning faces and the waving fists, Sarah can see her mother, her head bowed, face hidden in her hands, shoulders shaking. Next to her sits Ned, silent, staring down at his boots. Sarah wills him to look up at her, but he does not move.

  The judge’s voice is addressing her, but from somewhere that seems to be a great distance away.

  ‘… you have been found guilty of the heinous crime of child-stealing. There can be few acts more cruel than to deprive an innocent mother of her child. Moreover, your own wicked actions, carried out for personal gain, have led to the death of this infant. If I were able to impose a severer sentence upon you I would happily do so, but the law, alas, allows me only to impose a maximum sentence of seven years’ transportation. I therefore hereby impose that maximum sentence upon you, and order that you be transported to the colonies for a term of seven years. Guards, take the prisoner down.’